Once
the U.S. led in the space race, exploring the moon and sending probes
to distant stars. Now that's far from the case, as funding to
the U.S. space program has
been cut and goals scaled back. Fortunately, there are
plenty of other innovative nations willing to step in and pick up the
slack.

Now the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency has updated the
world on its progress. The sail is performing extremely well,
constantly accelerating, with every passing day.

Japanese
researchers calculated that each photon striking the sail exerts
0.00025 pounds of force on the sail. That force adds up slowly,
speeding up the the 3,000 square foot sail and its attached 700-pound
payload.

With the new Japanese success, solar sail look to
become the new gold standard for deep space propulsion, until better
technologies (plasma
engines, nuclear
engines) are more fully developed. And the success is a
sign of Japan's growing presence as a space pioneer.

Japan
plans to land a robotic
army on the moon, starting a few years from now. In the
private sector, the Planetary Society, a space research group,
and Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, N.Y., headed by Ann Druyan, a film
producer and widow of the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan,
will launch
the LightSail-1, another solar sail design, into space late
this year.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007